Chapter 17
A VISIT FROM ROSALIE
Mrs. Osgood Nilsson, like her husband, was an odd mixture. Her mother was of Irish lineage, being a daughter of The O’Croglin of O’Croglin, head man of a hill tribe of Celts in County Galway. Her father had been a British actor who also wrote ghoulish extravaganzas under the nom-de-plume of D. Raquller.
Osgood Nilsson never mentioned this aspect of his father-in-law’s authorship, lest the fact somewhat tarnish the connection with The O’Croglin of O’Croglin, and also diminish his status with his own soldier grandfather.
But when Nilsson thought of his own father, he backed away from the image in his mind. All his need for assurance came from the disastrous memory when a small boy of finding his father shot, by his own hand, one morning.
The ghost walked from his mind when his blood-stream was polluted by excess of alcohol, and unknowingly he tried to transfer the ghost to others … Unknowingly, yes; for Nilsson at heart was a warm and generous man. Self-knowledge, in relation to the defects of others, was denied him; so he remained a second-rate, or superficial writer.
Otherwise, he was an amiable man. His wife was a generous woman, impelled by this trait to interest herself in the lives of others. Some people, who did not fully, that is intuitively, realise the chronic anxiety under which Rosalie Nilsson lived—never knowing when Osgood might fall under a stroke, or be killed while driving his motorcar—considered that she was merely a gossip, a retailer of the peccadilloes of others—in confidence, of course. Never tell Rosalie anything, these members of the haute bourgeoisie told one another, unless you wish everyone to know it …
Mrs. Nilsson was by now much interested in how Phillip was getting on, and what he was doing. Elizabeth’s account of her brother’s faults, from his earliest years, had surprised her; the poor woman obviously had a ‘thing’ about him; even so, there was much that intrigued her. The fact that he had been a ‘bad’ little boy meant nothing; and since his sister was obviously a neurotic character, much could be discounted. But other facts—if indeed they were facts—were surprising. Phillip had won the D.S.O., but relinquished it before going to prison in Wormwood scrubs, for arson! And he’d had an illegitimate son, and tried to get Lucy his wife, who’d had a child at the same time, to register both infants as her twins! And Elizabeth declared that he was always trying to get money from his relations, after refusing an inheritance of twelve hundred acres from his uncle, Hilary Maddison! There was something rather odd there—surely he could have sold the land after his uncle’s death, were he so keen on money?
These statements, taken into consideration with stories about him from other sources—mainly about his womanising in Shep Cot—Molly Bucentaur and her ’teen-age daughter Miranda—and other young women, including that girl with an odd name—one of the pseudo-literary world. The stories excited Rosalie Nilsson, so she decided to have a look at his ménage one afternoon. She could, sincerely, tell him how much she thought of his work; and invited him to have a meal with Osgood and herself.
She drove her car through the steep and narrow lane as far as the open moor, and walked across the heather, to find the door open, and no-one at home.
Then she saw him with his little dog, outlined against the steep heather slopes leading up to The Chains; but just in case someone was in the cot, she called out, “Hullo there! Anyone at home? Mr. Maddison, are you there?” A robin flew out of the doorway, and thus encouraged, Mrs. Nilsson walked over the threshold.
“Anybody at home?”
No answer. She entered and looked around before advancing to call up the stairs. “Are you all right?” She said, just in case someone was up there, “I’m Rosalie Nilsson, Osgood’s wife. This is a call, I suppose!”
Still no reply, so she returned outside. The common was empty for a quarter of a mile around. Thereupon she returned to the kitchen and quizzed first the bookshelves, then the papers on the table. There were two small piles of typed sheets: one on yellow paper, the other on white. After cautiously going up the stairs, to be sure no-one was there, she went down again and picking up the yellow sheets began to read.
That these last three days spent with P. have been perhaps the best time we have had together I cannot deny. But fundamentally there are the same doubts, and I find myself grieving because I know I cannot ever hope to really share myself, my life with him. There is a general sapping away of my spirit and thereby my creative reservoir gets clogged up; P.M. tries so sweetly to give me everything that I may need—but I cannot help feeling myself ever so often in some terrifying Faustian situation …
This was exciting. Rosalie turned over to the next page—no signature. Who could it be?
I want to help him—to restore his belief in himself, but it all seems beyond my capacity. I think the fact that he has not become my real lover accounts for a lot—for the desolate moments. There is a great tenderness between us and I feel now that I could not bear for us to make love in any way—
The visitant examined the typing; it was done by a typewriter different from that on the table. Could the writer be Miranda, of whose infatuation for Phillip she had heard at a cocktail party in Lynton? “My dear, old enough to be her grandfather!” A ridiculous remark—for Phillip was, according to Who’s Who, fifty one. He would have to have been very precocious to be a father at seventeen, and his son also a father at the same age, to be Miranda’s grandfather! ‘Buster’s’ secretary, perhaps? That was nearer the mark: the girl, Laura someone—very odd name—had a withdrawn look about her, eyes anywhere but on the faces of people in the street when she had seen her in Lynmouth …
I want above all to be a good, true lasting friend BUT I think P. hopes and longs for more. What am I to do? I am filled with such anguish at times for him, my own inability to love him completely, enough to say I shall be with you always we will make a life together. I know, feel, that there can be no change.
I think Melissa must have suffered the same feelings—though she was wiser (?!) in being objective from the first. The age difference is there and cannot be dismissed; M. knew and understood this from the first. I tried to believe otherwise (that essence between two people is the main bond.) But it has to be sum total of what we are from what we have been.
How can I free myself from P. without bringing him more anguish—how can I make him realise that I cannot be/feel as the image of a woman he has imprinted on his heart all these years: his young wife, the first one, who died when she was nineteen, his ideal companion? When with him there are some very lyrical moments, at the same time there is an aspect of life—a part of me—that seems to be cut off. I try to forget this, but it is there confronting me round every corner. It is I think a certain possessiveness of P’s side that weighs me down; and any lightness of spirit/thought by this almost obsessive demanding nature that P. has—even his way of leaving me, giving me freedom is something he is giving and not something that happens as a mutual recognition and sympathy that two people should have when with each other—
Yes, it must be that odd girl, Laura Wissilcraft. What a curious name! Transferring her own attitudes to Phillip, from what I have heard … very much so. That young woman had a flashing temper at times! It was said that ‘Buster’ had felt it on more than one occasion; but kept his feelings hidden, literally, under his mask. Osgood had a theory that he had something to hide about his own father, when the real reason of the poor man’s reticence was due to his incapacity—like the hero in Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in hopeless love with Brett, the girl ‘built like a yacht’—
Hence the headache that is with me today, for I fail to find a good solution to all this. I could not write a line while in Corfu.
So it was Laura, after all!
Time alone—but meanwhile? Oh dear God, help P.! Give him a little understanding of my situation. Give him strength and grace to go on alone and not delude himself and others any more. My heart is heavy. My spirit in splinters. No one has ever had this effect on
me. Is it love? A love of the spirit that can in a sense be almost destruction, dangerous in its absorbing power?
In a way, therefore, I hope he is able to make love to Miranda, who goes to see him whenever she can from her school, which she is soon to leave, I hear. An old stallion with a young mare produces the liveliest foal, they say.
Poor Laura, what a mix-up. She is quite right, this situation isn’t any good for her. Obviously it has no true base. I’d like to talk to her, if I could do so without appearing to be interfering …
Mrs. Nilsson took up the differently typed sheets. These were obviously Phillip’s work.
31 July 1917
The barrage fills a world pallid-black before dawn. The sky bubbles with light, the very earth is trembling. What tempests of fire! What upheavings and shakings! Tens of thousands of tons of brown earth going up every few moments, a slow advancing barrage in six lines of fire from more than a thousand guns of all calibres: six rolling walls of fire moving east in flame and smoke, concentrated on a 12-mile front, lifting 25 yards every minute: waves of infantry advancing 50–100 yards behind those curtains of flame, smoke, and all-obliterating noise. One is stunned, lifted out of body, struggling over torn clay of a dream-nightmare world, half-choked by fumes, crawling up pits of broken, smoking earth, seeing nothing except blackened clay and broken sandbags and twisted buried wire this side of an inferno of bursting shells.
The Great Push has begun. Third Ypres. The sky is a dragging grey, moving over from the south-west, the Atlantic. Will it rain? The battlefield is below sea-level, contained behind the dykes of Nieuport and Dunkerque.
I awoke this morning, as usual, with a feeling of deep depression; but managed to hack out the above words.
My problems, as L. would call them, appear insuperable. They are insuperable, the handicap is too great, one cannot win this race unless one travels alone. Perhaps no one can win this earthly race. Even Tolstoi, at the end, was defeated—hiding on a railway station from the anguish of a possessed wife.
Of those hundreds of thousands, those millions who died, young, between 1914–18, and again 1939–45, the poet Laurence Housman wrote,
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, or the years condemn …
I could no longer type in bed on the tea-tray, I got up and built the fire, rather than lie still in bed like a dying man, with diminishing consciousness: Death the Antic sitting between chest and belly, my life fading out like a film that is switched off. The images linger a moment, they diminish, the light is gone. And that is how one dies, I am sure. Consciousness lessens, recedes from ‘little body’—lying below one—while one thinks ‘that is not me, that is poor little body lying down there’. One is suspended above, looking down, in a strange calm unemotional bliss-azure feeling.
Later, I typed by the fire, warm tea inside me, a sandwich of Molly’s whole-wheat bread with butter and honey. Gone is my dismal grave-shroud mood of 5 a.m.; vanished those phantoms of despair waiting, like heirs in silence around my bed.
10 p.m. Laura and I were going to a beach on the north-west coast, (I have taught her to drive). I also wanted to write. “Take the car” I said. “It is yours”. She said she’d be back at six. She arrived at ten. She showed me shells, glass pebbles—some lovely aquamarine blue of 1880 bottles.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” She set them out. A rare sunset shell …
“So that’s where you’ve been. On cousin Willie’s beach, that he called Shelley Cove.”
“Yes,” she replied, looking at me steadily. “Would you like me to leave tomorrow?”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry I was bleak when you came back a little late.” She was four hours late, she said she’d be back for tea. I’d eaten little, she was to buy and bring back food. “Sea-shells, Sabrina Fair—how alike we are.”
“You make me feel guilty!” she cried. “I won’t feel guilty!”
Out she stormed, banging the door, and leaving me talking to myself.
I begin to see shape, and depth, for my novel. It will be several volumes. The Flying Dutchman theme—alienated first from my mother when 4 or 5 years of age; the wound healed by Barley; opened by her death. Yes, The Flying Dutchman theme. They’re all dead sings the chorus of girls after waiting in vain for the sailors from the dark ship to come to the wedding. A ghost ship indeed. The chorus is sung so lightly, lyrically, softly withal, like maiden girls tossing flowers. They’re all dead, both spring-song and requiem. Threnos. For those sailors are of all human life and death, they could be emanations from the Western Front, unreal, pursuing a dream, caught up in a dream of fair women, on the very margin of death. They live inside ruined bodies, each man with a figment of beauty and calm and intelligence always to be by his side, and he by her side.
I walked about the room, talking aloud to my Doppelgänger, “I am, as Marcel Proust was, all locked up inside, I cannot share my personality at this time. I need months of calm, with someone like Melissa to wean me from this shadow, or death-wish. My courage-fear death-wish!”
Laura, who apparently had been listening, at this point pushed the door open and cried “You cannot forgive yourself because all your friends were killed and you were not!” Then she said, “You are Christ’s boy, you want to go back in Time and be crucified! To lie in crater-zones, to join your German and English brothers! You are dead, dead! Like your Lucifer, your Hitler who stopped the advance on Dunkerque and let three hundred thousand British troops get off more or less scot free! ‘Buster’ told me that! Hitler stopped his tanks! And you told ‘Buster’ that Rundstedt’s doctor told you the Generals implored him to end the war by leaving no one to return to England. Hitler is like you. It was all a dream, like yours, a ‘Revolution to Destruction’, as one of his Ex-Nazis who became a sensible refugee wrote in nineteen thirty-eight, in one of ‘Buster’s’ books which was prophetic! So for God’s sake, cease your horrific convolution to destruction! You, ‘Buster’, the Brig, are all the same, you’re all dead, all dead, like the sailors in Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. Forget your cousin Willie’s ‘dream of fair women’, or rather his nightmare of disembodied, onanistic love. You’re strangling me, and my hopes of happiness with you! My talent is suborned, destroyed by a parasite. Not you, my poor friend, but your ideas. Wagner has done it all, once and for all! What do you want now a Götterdämmerung? Like ‘Buster’—playing over his Bayreuth records half the night. Listening with eyes closed to all else but his own noble death in a Great Cause? To rescue that poor sad creature who flew to England and fell among thieves? What would Hess do without his dreams, withered as his own body, if he and ‘poor little body’ were set free? He’d be lost, without his torment! He’s lived in hell so long he’s become an angel, knowing no other condition of life! Can’t you see the truth of what I am trying to tell you? For you’re killing me! I am Mother Earth, as you once said, I am Proserpine, but what are you? Shall I tell you? The Flying Dutchman!’
The door slammed again, she was gone. I felt like a fly bitten by the poison-fang of a spider. I was paralysed, appalled, and afraid. Frozen. It was the same when we were in London. She was rude, bad-mannered the night before she left for Corfu and we were in the Medicean Club. She got half-way through dinner and left abruptly. It was more than humiliating, it was shattering.
She has never understood what it has meant to have gone through two wars and be left with a sense of failure in all things. Or has she understood, with her terrifying clairvoyance? It is her manner which inhibits me. I have heard that the German Generals were often inhibited, in Hitler’s presence, by his bad manners. They were not used to being shouted at. Yet who am I to judge? Haven’t I, in the past, shouted at Lucy? Before the silent children? Good Generals use their heads, not their emotions. The German officers were trained to politeness, and could not cope with bad manners. As Lucy could not cope with mine, and for the same reasons: my cursed drive to perfection, which is the artist’s problem, and one not to be shared wi
th others, unless they are to be destroyed. At least I know, and knew it. I don’t think Laura does know it, of herself; for she also in her writing, is dedicated to perfection. And I stand in the way. We are two people trying to occupy the same place: Siamese twins each struggling to be supreme. For she, too, is all inside herself, appearing insensitive, in action, to the feelings of another, in her turn. She is, as I said, all inside herself, shut off: a subjective writer. And she damns me for being that: I, who am striving to get outside my subject, which is no less than the dilemma of Western man, viewed from all aspects, with sympathy and precision.
For the Great War was the epitome of lovelessness in Western Civilisation. That is the theme that has long possessed me. And Laura, with her eyes haunted and compassionate, sweet girl, longs to seduce me from this death-work, seeing herself as Persephone leading me back to life from the gentian-blue halls of Dis, into which poor D. H. Lawrence entered when he died at Vence by the Mediterranean Sea in 1930.
Laura carries within herself the main lament of Eve, of Erda the earth-Mother; of Persephone dedicated to bring back the dead to life, that the phoenix may accept its failure and become whole again, so that it shall cherish the turtle dove waiting to build her raft-nest in the hawthorn bush, thereon to lay her two eggs—innocent and white, without camouflage, visible to every pillaging crow and magpie.
I was a loveless boy, unit of a loveless Europe sending Youth to the Western Front, and again, after two decades, another generation to the Steppes of Russia and the shambles of Europe, followed by its scape-goats to the gallows and the crematoria. But on my Western Front there were little candles throwing far their gleams in a naughty world … Christmas tree candles on German parapets of front-line trenches, to welcome the Engländer Kameraden. What shall I do? I said to myself, helplessly. Then the door opened, and in she came again, putting down a yellow paper in the table, while saying quietly to me, “Read that, please. You will find the answer to your question there.”
The Gale of the World Page 24